PBA Galleries

Autograph Note Signed (“Henry”) on a postcard. 1 pp.

To his brother, William P. Fenn, Lindsay California: “Big scoop yesterday. Chinese police (Chang's soldiers) with a permit from the [?] & ‘Dippy Corps’ walked into Russian Barracks and copped 22 Ruskis and 75 Chinks, machine guns, ammunition, etc. Russ tried to burn papers but most were saved by turning fire hose down chimney. Peking is jubilant. Neat bit of coop between Dippy Corps and government and making for better feeling. Nevertheless we’re leaving as soon as we can get out. Maybe a refugee boat will be along in ten days and will go steerage. This is livin'”. First-hand account of a seminal moment in the Chinese civil wars of the 1920s – with a wink from the European Diplomatic Corps, an attack by warlord Chang Tso-lin, on the Soviet Russian embassy in Peking and Chinese Communists who were sheltered there, carried out almost at the same time as the Shanghai “massacre” of Chinese Communists by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. The Peking raid netted scores of incriminating official Soviet documents showing Russian collusion with local Communist leaders, who were later executed This cheered the more conservative Americans in Peking like 33 year-old Henry Fenn, son of a veteran American missionary whose whole family soon fled the country on an American boat bound for San Francisco. Henry Fenn later became one of America’s leading Sinologists, “architect” of Yale University’s China program. His brother, who received this card, was also a missionary and educator who would direct Protestant-sponsored colleges in China during World War II. A rare historic note about the Chinese turmoil of the 1920s, by an eminent Old China Hand.